Japanese decadeology

Japan, it is sometimes said, is a society of the future.

If so, then the future of pop music, as already experienced by Japan this decade, is looking radically uncertain. W. David Marx's guide to Japanese music since 2000 is pretty essential reading, with plenty of good links to hard to find tunes. And while one might find fault with some of Marxy's finer points or aesthetic judgments, it's difficult to argue with the main industrial-commercial thrust of his thesis, that is, if you discerned an across-the-board decline in Japanese pop music this decade--from the experimental underground to the Oricon heights of J-Pop--it's not for lack of talented musicians, but rather, the lack of a commercial infrastructure to support them. When the titans of '90s shibuya-kei (Cornelius, Kahimi Karie, Pizzicato Five, etc.) scattered in all directions at the start of the decade, there were plenty of younger acts ready to step into the breach. The fatal obstacle, as encountered by short-lived bands like Petset or Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, was the Japanese economy itself:

The problem was, selling out after 2005 was not even an option. The only real artistic solution was to get more weird, but the record labels did not want to go further into debt and no one really had the heart. Most of this generation had seen the Shibuya-kei guys succeed both financially and critically at making interesting indie music and wanted to follow that path. ... [but] here in 2010, the entire infrastructure for good indie music has completely been wiped out, and those who were once our greatest hope to “save” Japanese music have retreated into doing things more rewarding than commercial music — eating, breathing, sleeping, throwing things against other things, counting clouds, quietly reading, personal hygiene.

Vital, commercially successful pop continues to be made here and there--I agree with Marxy's positive assessment of Shugo Tokumaro--but revolutionary figures like Oorutaichi are in uncharted and lonely territory. It's already been three years since his beautifully funky Drifting My Folklore came out, and though he recently mustered a well-received tour of European art spaces and small clubs, the market for another Oorutaichi record, particularly in Japan, looks pretty shaky to say the least. It's safe to say that fifteen years ago, he would have had two or three albums out by now, and received offers to produce a daring mainstream act or two. Nowadays, it's not so clear what the path for a guy like him is.

Japan's artistic economy is rapidly realizing Momus's old joke that "in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people". This is potentially a radically egalitarian cultural environment: a place where it is impossible to depend on a "star system" of big cultural producers. While that's not a bad thing at all in my book--especially if more people discover more of their own creativity--it does make one wonder what accomplished artists who work their asses off fulltime are supposed to be doing for survival money. Hopefully a social revolution of another sort isn't far behind.

Decadeology (Robot Hero Edition)

I tried my hand at Madmadcat's decade mixtape challenge: 20 songs, 2 songs from each year, with no band duplicates. I tried to go for a mix with a decent flow and I think I succeeded somewhat. Naturally, it was difficult to pick just 20 songs to represent the past 10 years, but that is part of the fun. And really, it's in no way representative of the entire decade. Get the download link after the jump. You can peruse the tracklist while you wait for the file and clown (or praise) me in the comments.

Decadeology (Madmadcat edition)

Or, twenty songs I’d rather remember the noughties by

This is the decade mixtape challenge: 20 songs, 2 songs from each year, with no band duplicates. Download my exercise in decadeology here (zip file, 123 MB). While you’re waiting for that to come down the pipe, a bit more about my rationale after the jump...

Robots after all

A common denominator to a lot of best-of-decade lists surely is Daft Punk, really the ultimate crossover dance act everyone could agree on over the past ten years. I don't really mind this; I quite like them and their tremendous influence on our culture is pretty positive. (There are many worse things Kanye West could have gotten into.) But for my money, the pounding French house + rock riffage thing only does so much. In 2005, when the world was going nuts for Human After All, I was rather more taken with a cheerfully demented retort, Robots après tout, the eighth album by French pop singer Philippe Katerine. Here in 'Le train de 19h', if my French isn't mistaken, he sings about a train ride in which the conductor makes lewd puns, a young woman reads The Portrait of Dorian Gray while stroking her hair flirtatiously, and a fluorescent-haired art student claims to be endowed with the talent of self-fellation. In any case the journey ends with Katerine frantically shouting "Kiss me! Kiss me! Kiss me!" Like much of Katerine's output it's all kinda WTF, but this shit is rad.

Decadeology: A veil of diamond dust

One of the biggest releases in the past ten years, for me, was Kate Bush's Aerial. I fell in love with her when I first came across her in the mid-eighties. Hounds of Love had just been released and I quickly grabbed her previous releases. In 1993, she put out The Red Shoes and I have to confess that I was disappointed. So I hoped it was just a minor misstep, even Kate Bush can make a mistake, and waited for the next album. And I waited and waited. Soon enough, it seemed like she had disappeared from music altogether. There would be whispers and rumours of a new album every now and then, but nothing. In the summer of 2005, another rumor popped up. Then, there was actually a single, and a shiny new website! The anticipation was killing me.

I picked up Aerial one day in early November and, let me tell you, it did not disappoint. It's difficult to quantify whether it was worth a twelve year wait or not (how would you really measure that?), but the fact that it was a solid album helped lessen the sting a bit. I'd say that Nocturn is probably my favorite song on the album. It's the second to last track on the album and, to me, the preceding songs are like the steps that lead up to the pedestal of Nocturn. This song is the centerpiece of the album. The way it moves, it's very sensual. Not to mention the lyrics, running around on a beach naked, just before dawn. She's very good at painting pictures with her words.

Kate Bush > Nocturn

Decadeology: Listening too long to one song!

I shamelessly stole this idea from Madcat Joe. On my own blog, I've been doing this series of posts where I've been writing about my favorite songs of the decade. So I'm gonna cross post a bit, I've done it once already, hope it's not too lame.

I really like all of the New Pornographers' output, you really cannot go wrong if you were to choose only one of their albums to spin. That being said, I think Twin Cinema is a really, really great power pop album. For me, Sing Me Spanish Techno is the focal point of that album. It's an incredibly catchy, driving pop song with great singalong-ability. If you have heard the song, then chances are you know what I'm talking about (and possibly agree with me). If you haven't heard it, I honestly think you're missing out and you can give it a chance here.

The New Pornographers > Sing Me Spanish Techno

The golden age

A new decade is soon upon us, and while some people (um, like us) are busy looking back, putting together mixes of their favorite music from the past ten years, Momus is naturally already looking ahead. Go and read his notes on 2010-2019 right now, and you will understand why we'll soon begin to eat more mushrooms, learn to make more things with wood, and finally stop wearing jeans. Furthermore:

Your body will thank you for using a bicycle every day during the new decade. Using bicycles will become a condition of using computers successfully too: the correspondence between them will become clearer over time.

I can only hope he's being literal here, and the widespread adoption of pedal-powered laptops becomes reality. Finally:

You have been underestimating the colour yellow.

Indeed we have. I can't wait for yellow--gossamer, silky, pale, enlightened, friendly yellow--to be the new silvery blue-black, which for some reason has been the only legal color in Hollywood since about 2001. The monochrome black thing is never a sign of cultural health--it wasn't for the puritans and it sure isn't now. (I'm looking at you, Tim Burton. The director of Pee-wee's Big Adventure knows better.)

So in the spirit of yellow, and of bicycles, and of a friendlier decade ahead, let's have a look at this picture:



This is from Ryan McGinley's 2007 series I Know Where The Summer Goes. I hope this type of photography will be an influence on the values of the next decade. McGinley's is an aesthetic of adventure, playfulness, and vitality, with nary a scowling angel-of-death supermodel to be seen. (Warning: As there are lots of nude people in this summery series, that link I just gave you isn't very safe for work. Sorry if you've already been fired.)

That is all for now. You have 53 days left to wear your jeans, so put them on, go outside, and slide around in the mud. Have fun.

Decadeology: I must above all things love myself

Grinderman's No Pussy Blues starts off with a tapping typewriter and the nervous click of a hi-hat, while a bass drum keeps time like a heartbeat. It reminds me of someone sitting at a table, drumming their fingers while waiting for bad news. The voice of Nick Cave comes in to tell the tale of how he's aged and how he's not taking it so well. He meets a girl at a gig and, try as he might, he can't seem to maneuver her into the sack. He lets out his pent-up frustration and shouts out "DAMN!" as the song explodes into a screeching fury of guitars, banging drums and crashing cymbals. This song takes everything down to base levels. Drums, guitars and bass. Dude just wants to get laid, is that so wrong? Easily one of my favorite songs and albums of the past decade. Not to mention it was an absolute treat to see them live at such a small venue.

Grinderman > No Pussy Blues

Oorutaichi!

Osaka musician and DJ Taichi Moriguchi, aka Oorutaichi, is playing a gig next month in London as part of the International Festival of Exploratory Music. I'm going to be there with bells on.

Through a small but significant trickle of underground singles and CD-R releases over the past decade, Oorutaichi has been quietly reimagining and reconfiguring the base folkloric elements of pop music in a funky, humanised electronic soup. His sound is a strangely alluring, shiny goop. It is odd, fun and playful. As Oorutaichi sings in his own invented language, drawing on a synthetic mythos of some fantastic planet, you sense this is where pop can go next, or ought to. As Momus put it last year, "his music sounds new to me, now, the way Neu! and La Dusseldorf and Can and Faust probably sounded to David Bowie in 1977".

The dizzyingly groovy 2007 album Drifting My Folklore, a refinement and summation of his work up to that point, is essential. It includes the 2006 disco "Misen Gymnastics", which was my first introduction to Oorutaichi pop.